The Longue Durée of Literary Prestige

Ted Underwood is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author, most recently, of Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (2013). His essay “Historical Difference as Immortality in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel” appeared in the December 2002 issue of MLQ.

Jordan Sellers is instructor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His most recent essay, “Zero Ground: Mapping Maritime Commemoration in the Age of Nelson,” appeared in the December 2015 edition of European Romantic Review.

Abstract

A history of literary prestige needs to study both works that achieved distinction and the mass of volumes from which they were distinguished. To understand how those patterns of preference changed across a century, we gathered two samples of English-language poetry from the period 1820–1919: one drawn from volumes reviewed in prominent periodicals and one selected at random from a large digital library (in which the majority of authors are relatively obscure). The stylistic differences associated with literary prominence turn out to be quite stable: a statistical model trained to distinguish reviewed from random volumes in any quarter of this century can make predictions almost as accurate about the rest of the period. The “poetic revolutions” described by many histories are not visible in this model; instead, there is a steady tendency for new volumes of poetry to change by slightly exaggerating certain features that defined prestige in the recent past.